Gone Falling
by Eevee
Summary: If life ever had taught him anything, it was that games, no matter how captivating, are only trivial details in the big picture. Once upon a time, Hikaru played Go.


**Gone Falling**

_Once upon a time in my life / I went falling_  
- Once Upon A Time, The Smashing Pumpkins

**I.**  
Once upon a time, Hikaru played baseball. He started when he was nine, and quit when he entered middle school. He was never particularly good at it, but it had been fun, and his dad had been proud.

Once upon a time, Hikaru played soccer. He hadn't really had the time for after school activities in high school, but he felt that that one little luxury, he could allow himself, and proved it to his mother by not buying a single video game for the three years his career as goalie lasted.  
Once upon a time, Hikaru played tennis. He picked it up in college, because he needed the workout and team sports demanded a regular attendance he couldn't make any guarantees about.

Tennis is the only thing he still plays on occasion, but in his parents' living room, there are three photos of him with a baseball bat in his hands, and a student newspaper from his high school with a picture in which he kneels in front of twenty other young men, gloves on and ball in his hands. He's worse at tennis than he ever was at baseball or soccer, but for all the passion that he once might have devoted to the sports, there are other things that matter more. Somewhere along the way, he became a responsible adult who learned to value his education over his team's effort in the tournament; and to know that no matter how ratty his tennis shoes are getting, there are other things to save money for now. He sighs a little, and turns away from the window display to continue on his way home, and that is when somebody speaks his name.

He's not sure who he thinks that it is, because he doesn't quite recognize the voice. Still, the familiarity has him turning around expectantly before he has the time to think twice, but the motion comes to a clumsy halt when he recognize the man standing in front of him.

There are, after all, not a lot of professions irregular enough to let you off at noon, and even fewer of those that demand neckties. And even for those, it isn't often you see people who can slump so artfully with the jacket hanging off their arm in the August heat as Yoshitaka Waya had at sixteen.

Once upon a time, Hikaru played Go.

**II.**  
"I teach," he offered when Waya wanted to know why he was loitering around in the middle off the day, "Tohoku middle school. Social studies."

"Ah," Waya replies with a raised eyebrow, "vacation. Ha, my old man always wanted me to become a teacher. Still taunts me about that when he and mom go to Okinawa at this time of the year."

"It's alright," Hikaru says with a shrug and a smile, because it's been ten years since he and Waya were buddies and he could bitch about whatever he pleased and know that Waya was sure to agree with a grin and a slap on his shoulder to chill, already.

"You know, the way you used to - " Waya starts, but apparently thinks better of whatever he was going to say. He shuts his mouth briefly, before starting anew, "explains the hair, I guess. I almost didn't recognize you without the dye-job."

Hikaru makes an agreeing sound. Ten awkward seconds pass, until he realize that the most painless way to end this will probably be to make a couple of polite inquires before excusing himself. He's fairly certain that Waya won't be yelling after him this time.

"So, you're working?" he asks, and mentally slaps himself for the obvious question.

"Yeah," Waya nods, "I'm tutoring some kid around here who wants to become an insei. Hey, maybe she's one of your pupils! Kasama, name ring any bells?" he sighs a little as Hikaru shakes his head, "yeah, I guess her parents are a little too well off to have her in public school."

After a few seconds, he speaks up again. "Touya took the Kisei title last year."

"Really?" Hikaru says, but what he means is _it took him that long?_

"Yeah."

"What about you?" Hikaru asks, and Waya lights up.

"I qualified for the Honinbo league this year - was knocked out last week, though."

"That's... really good," Hikaru says lamely and digs his hands into his pockets.

"Yeah - I mean, sensei always said that I - well. Well, Ochi's been playing more league games than any of us. Hasn't done him much good this far."

"More than Touya?"

Waya looks momentarily startled at Hikaru's inquiry, before he once again turns serious, and vaguely hesitant.

"Touya put his career on hold when he rounded twenty. Went abroad to spread the word, or what do I know - he was gone for three years, stayed in Los Angeles for two of them and most of the last one in Seoul."

"Why would he do that? I didn't even know that people played Go in America," Hikaru says with a frown. Waya shrugs.

"I asked Ashiwara-san about it. Not that Touya ever actually explained it to anybody likely to talk about it - I hear that it caught even Ogata-sensei off guard - but Ashiwara-san was the only guy who actually could get him to, you know, crack a smile on occasion. Well, he thought that it probably was because he had 'greater goals' than... whatever it was that we couldn't offer him here. I'm not sure I really get it, but it didn't matter much for his career. He came back and picked up where he left as if it had just been a week since he last played a real game, and now he's challenging for the Juudan and the Ouza."

Hikaru nods, because there really is nothing else to do. He doesn't know who holds these titles these days - not that he really knew it back then, either. He'd caught a TV mention about some Kobayashi taking the Honinbo a couple of years back, but if he'd taken it from old Kuwabara, or somebody else had done it before him...

...and are they giving Touya a challenge worthy of him?

"So Touya's still going strong, huh?"

"Touya is Touya," Waya says with a mild irritation that Hikaru honestly would have expected him to have grown out of by now, "and while he was away, Ochi, Isumi and Aoyama were considered the top of the younger players - well, they still are, I guess, but people tend to remember Touya for his dad's name and his insane rise after he went pro."

If Hikaru had been fourteen, he'd been grinning like an idiot and asking _and what about you, huh?_, and Waya would get worked up and yell about how Morishita-sensei didn't start playing in the big leagues until he was over fifty. But that was ten years ago, and who knows what Waya will say today? For all that Hikaru knows, Morishita-sensei might not even be alive; for all Hikaru knows, Waya might have a wife and a baby and thinks that the first time his daughter calls him "daddy" is infinitely more important than winning some silly title tournament.

Hikaru, after all, has no idea who Aoyama is, and what achievements he has made to become a player on par with Ochi and Isumi-san.

So Hikaru doesn't say it, and Waya doesn't say anything more either, and they stand together and carefully try to avoid each other's eyes until it has gone far past awkward.

"So -"

"Shindou - "

There is a moment of silence until Hikaru answers.

"Yes?"

Waya opens his mouth to continue, but makes two false starts, "Why -" he tries, but close his mouth, "never mind. It was nice seeing you."

"Yeah. Good luck further, I guess."

Waya nods. "Thanks," after a brief pause, he nods again, "bye."

"Bye," Hikaru says quietly, and Waya walks away, hands still jammed in the pockets of his pants and hair still looking too artfully tousled to be convincingly casual. Hikaru looks after him until he has to blink and then can't finds him again in the crowd crossing the street.

**III.**  
And like that, Yoshitaka Waya, with his pride and his drive and his love of Go, has once again left Hikaru's life. And Hikaru is in the exact same spot as he was before, standing by the window display of a sport equipment store in Tamachi and knowing that he can't afford to spend that sort of money on shoes because he wants to get Mayumi something pretty for the honeymoon.

It's odd, he thinks, how little Waya had changed, and what if they run into each other ten years from now? Will Waya have a title? Will Touya have left the country, like his father did, for good? Will Ochi have surpassed Isumi-san, once and for all?

And Hikaru, where will he be?

In ten years, Hikaru will probably still be a social studies teacher at Tohoku middle school. He'll still be living in the apartment he bought with a loan that he would rather not think about. He'll probably have quit playing tennis, too. In ten years, Hikaru is probably going to have a steady job with a steady income, a son or a daughter or maybe both and Mayumi and, if he's lucky, the cat his mother always refused to let him keep. Go isn't all there is to life, he thinks, and thinks about Sai, who lived and died and lived another thousand years for it. He thinks about Touya, who was willing to postpone his career as a professional player just to play _him_, of Isumi-san who took fall after fall in order to devote his life to the game. He thinks about Waya, and Touya-sensei, and then he thinks about how happy Sai was whenever he got to play.

He's not fifteen any longer, and it has been years since he paused enough to realize that it probably wouldn't have mattered either way if he'd kept playing back then, that whatever it was that decided that Sai's time was out, it probably hadn't been within Hikaru's power to stop. It has been years since he made peace with himself about that, and moved on, and it's been years, even, since he found himself tearing up at night because he was alone in his room. He's an adult, now, and has made his way perfectly fine, predictable and secure.

"Sai," he says quietly, voice barely audible above the dim of the traffic, "what would you have thought of this?"

Sai, he knows, would not appreciate the kind of sacrifice that Hikaru once made in his memory. Sai only cared about Go, about people playing Go, _children_ playing Go. Sai had loved to play the game, but more than that, he had loved the game itself; Sai had been so excited about helping Hikaru on his way towards Touya and Touya-sensei and all the other players on the top. But even Sai might not have cared so much about playing Touya and Touya-sensei if he could have known -

Because Sai had been just as proud as Hikaru once had been over his growing skills at the game.

It has been ten years since the last time Hikaru sat in front of the Go board, but he still remembers his first game as a pro, or rather, the anticipation in the wait for Touya who never showed up. It's been ten years, but more vivid than his graduation, than his first day in front of the blackboard, even than the moment he realized that he had fallen in love with Mayumi for real, he remembers the game between Sai and Touya-sensei in the Room of Profound Darkness.

Hikaru was twelve years old when he was pulled into a world of black and white pieces on smooth, lacquered lines. Once there, he had discovered a way of life built on an ancient, graceful logic - a life of competition and experience and growth, of wins and losses and a goal that had nothing to do with money or fame or unbroken records. It had been something new and so completely alien from the life of school and empty, boring afternoons that was all that Hikaru had known before he met Fujiwara-no-Sai and Akira Touya. It had been a plane of existence that had demanded that Hikaru strive to reach it, and where he needed to face every battle to remain.

In the end, he hadn't. And even though his parents and his friends all assure him that he has made it good in life with his proper occupation and his not-too-small apartment and Mayumi, it is with a sudden stab of melancholy that it hits him that Waya is playing in the big leagues, that Waya has gotten _that good_ in the ten years since they last met.

Because it has been ten years already, and three seconds ago, Hikaru realized that he never since had found something that made it feel like it would all be worth it, not in the way that Akira Touya's words about the Hand of God once did.

It had been a passion that he never found again, back when he still had the time to look for it.

He sees his reflection in the display window, hair neatly trimmed and bangs proper and black, and cast a final glance at the shoes he had stopped to admire. There is no regret in turning away from them, now. If his strive towards the kind of life his mother always insisted was proper and satisfactory ever taught him anything, it was this:

That games, no matter how captivating, are still only trivial details of the big picture.


End file.
